A major mistake the new people to the marketing circle make is the notion that a few banners being placed selectively on your site is going to generate hits, and in turn bring you business. This is indeed not a sound thought, as it is not true. These banners may look great and really fluff up your site, but the reality is people generally view banners as Spam. In today's net society, Spam is a major pain in the butt, and should be avoided at all cost. If a viewer sees Spam in your site, they are less likely to return. There is a possible sale lost.
Taking into account, affiliates can easily draw attention to your site by a similar interest perspective. By going the way of an affiliate site, this is a great thing for a newbie to look into and in turn runs more hits to your site. This will boost your page ranking, and volume of visitors for the web site. This leads all to more sales and increases in profit in doing so. When looking for an affiliate site, make sure that there is some relevance between your site and the affiliate that you are looking to work with. It will make absolutely no sense to place a link to your candle site, in a tropical fish web page. The two just don't seem to meet in the middle. This is not to say that the content of the two sites has to be an exact match, just a very close association. It can be a very slim margin of visitors to your site if you do not promote a relevant subject on the affiliates site. This is a good way to waste another sites page space and time, and really will not get you anywhere fast in this industry.
Don't discount the fact that you may make a few sales, yet a few sales are not going to keep you in the business very long. Sometimes you can get a dose of blind luck however, don't bank on luck to see you through. That being said, the likelihood of the affiliate site even wanting your link on their site, if it is not related to what they deal with is improbable. A major stumbling block for young up and coming web site stars is the understanding of not wasting time on something that most probably will not sell. Count your losses and move on to the next endeavor. The use of really good articles that give summery on what your product is can be a one-way ticket right to the top. By allowing people to view small informative segments of product info, you do not bore them or have them feeling the site is too cluttered with meaningless junk. No one wants to spend an entire day just looking for a small piece of that pie.
As mentioned, banner ads are pretty much a poor choice. This is not solely reserved for your site. You will want to stay away from placing a banner ad on the affiliate site, as well. These banner ads are just an eye sore. It is not a great idea, to attempt to place one on the affiliate sites page. It will make their page less appealing, and still not do what it is you want it too. Even if you do get a decent flow of traffic to your site, it is still recommended for you to keep the banners to a bare minimum. Pretty much the entire net marketing circle considers them to be nothing more than eye candy to the inexperienced viewer anyway. It is clear to the best net marketers that the best method of advertisements is of the text-based variety. This may seem more flat and less shiny, yet it does convey the information and directive just as clearly to the viewer.
No one wants to be force fed information; they would like to find out things for themselves. Banner ads, themselves are mostly overlooked anyways, as they are like elevator music, when on the phone with your doctor's office. People are indeed interested in learning, yet this will always be done at their own pace. Trying to force a sale will only drive them away. They get enough of this by way of retail stores; nobody wants it on the net, as well.